Combining meshes every frame?

Graphics Shaders & Materials
1

Hello,
I have several objects which use the same transparent material and shader (with only three variations in the shader parameters) all affected by physics. Unity is doing some dynamic batching (about 15~30 out of 120 draw calls) but i would like to further reduce this number since it’s too heavy for mobile.

The only way i can think of is to combine the objects which share the same shader into a single mesh, but since they are always moving around I would have to combine them once every frame. Is this technique worth a try or is Mesh.Combine even more expensive if done every frame?

2

That’s what dynamic batching is: combining meshes every frame. And that’s why it has limitations on the amount of vertex attributes that can be used. Otherwise the time spent on batching is more than the time spent on draw calls, so it would be a net loss. So no, it’s not worth trying. Look at the profiler and see where you might be able to optimize something else.

–Eric